Hayao Miyazaki, the master craftsman of hand-drawn animation, comes bumping into Venice with The Wind Rises, a gorgeous yet ultimately frustrating tribute to the Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi. Here is a film with a clean outline and a foggy centre. I wanted to love it, tried to love it and then went down in flames. It turns out that it is not always possible to view the beauty in isolation. Sometimes you need to take a long, hard look at the outside world and then perhaps connect the two.

The Wind Rises tells the story of a peaceful man in the service of ruinous ends. It is a film about pure artistry and impure results. Jiro Horikoshi is the myopic, wide-eyed genius who winds up assisting the rearmament of Germany and goes on to create the phenomenal Mitsubishi Zero fighter jets for the Japanese military. "Who are they going to fight?" he says idly, as though he's asking about the weather forecast. Jiro, it seems, has no particular interest in promoting the war or preventing the war. He is more concerned with the health of his sickly fiancee; more focused on the wonderful nuts and bolts business of designing his planes. "The dream of aviation is cursed," a ghostly mentor tells him at one stage. "But what would you choose – a world with pyramids or one without?"

Jiro's Zero fighters were later built at slave labour camps and were used for kamikaze missions, although the film does not mention this. Jiro, for his part, is painted as an innocent, incurious man who perhaps feels that his responsibilities end when his planes are complete. All of which would be fine – a great springboard for a drama about art and its consequences – were it not for the fact that Miyazaki is so incurious too. The film-maker so clearly admires his subject that he never truly stoops to question his vision or hold his man to account.

Naturally the animation is a joy to behold. The film's crisp colours and commanding lines summon up a ravishing portrait of pre-war Japan with its puffing steam-trains, huddled neighbourhoods and lulling nocturnal tram-rides through town. Some of the setpieces (most notably the apocalyptic earthquake that leads to the burning of Tokyo) are the equal of anything the director has produced in Spirited Away or My Neighbour Totoro. But the film itself is genteel to a fault. It's too polite, it needs more bite. It lets enigmatic Horikoshi off the hook, bobbing out to the clouds, forever out of reach.